


Beyond the Dune Sea

by Vinyarie



Series: What We've Become [3]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Force Ghost Qui-Gon Jinn, Gen, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 17:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20934008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vinyarie/pseuds/Vinyarie
Summary: Obi-Wan has known for years that Ahsoka is still alive and working for the rebellion. He’s done his best to put her out of his mind as belonging to a life that is no longer his. And then she survives a meeting with Darth Vader and shows up on his doorstep on Tatooine with some things to say to him about it, they both have to figure out how to start fitting the separate pieces of their lives back together again.





	Beyond the Dune Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a canon-divergent AU. However, you can probably read this story on its own if you go into it with the understanding that Ahsoka and Darth Vader’s confrontation on Malachor went significantly differently than in canon. 
> 
> I mention Asajj Ventress in this. I am aware of the events of Dark Disciple, but I haven’t read it and am not taking it into account.

He rose with the first sun every morning, and was out checking the moisture collectors while the dawn chill still lingered over the sand dunes. He spent his mornings meditating, or practicing lightsaber drills he’d learned in another lifetime, or simply resting in the hottest part of the day. Often in the late afternoons and evenings, when the suns’ heat wasn’t quite so unbearable, he went roaming over the dunes.  
  
Even the days that were out of the ordinary followed a certain pattern. Sometimes he’d go into town for supplies, and stop at the cantina. Occasionally he’d speak to Owen or one of the other moisture farmers in the area. Once in a great while he spoke to Luke. More often he simply watched from afar.  
  
He woke to find a little red light blinking on the communicator he kept by his bed out of habit. He never used it. Almost never.  
  
_Flash. Flash. Flash._ Steady, even pulses, telling him there was a message waiting for him. He reached out, almost mesmerized, to pick it up. It didn’t occur to him until he was holding the device in his hand to be afraid.  
  
Only one person knew this comm frequency. Only one person would be sending him a message, and he wouldn’t do it lightly. Bail had sent him other messages, a few times. Less than a handful in all the years he’d been on Tatooine. They both knew the dangers. Sending a message at all meant it was important. It didn’t have to mean it was disastrous. Though it could very well be.  
  
Obi-Wan closed his fingers around the comm for a moment, feeling almost as if it was a relic from some alien world. _Flash. Flash. Flash._ He took a deep breath, full of dry air and sun-baked rock and the fleeting notes of scraggly, determined plants clinging to life in the desert.  
  
He opened the message. Text only, no sound. They’d decided it was better that way. Safer, harder to track. He stared down at it, reading it once, twice, three times, not because he struggled to understand what it meant, but because he couldn’t quite believe it meant what he thought it did.  
  
_Sending your granddaughter to see you. She ran into an old friend of yours recently—you know the one. You should talk to her. Be wary. _  
  
It wasn’t signed, but then it didn’t have to be. No more than he had to even think about it to know who Bail meant by _your granddaughter_ and _an old friend._  
  
Ahsoka. Ahsoka was coming here, and if Bail had told her where he was, he must have believed it was safe. No less safe than usual, anyway. Obi-Wan couldn’t decide whether he was terrified, or ashamed, or overjoyed at the idea of seeing her again. More likely all three.  
  
But all of that was tempered by the other part of the message. _You know the one._ Yes. He did know the one. And perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that Ahsoka would have found herself face-to-face with the being known as Darth Vader. She was working for the rebellion, after all. One of Bail’s very few other messages had told him that. And no matter how she had left, she had still trained as a Jedi. Of course she would eventually face the Sith apprentice.  
  
His eyes widened as he suddenly realized the full implications of Bail’s message. She had faced him, and she had survived. Bail didn’t say how, but he had told her where to find Obi-Wan.  
  
Yes. They probably did need to talk. And Bail was right—he should be wary.  
  
He put the comm aside. He knew he should erase the message, for safety. Somehow he didn’t want to do it just yet. Instead, he went and checked the moisture collectors.  
  
He still hadn’t erased the message hours later, as he stirred a pot of something resembling soup.  
  
_You’re unusually agitated today._ The voice didn’t sound in his ears, but in his mind, though it was no less familiar.  
  
He turned. Qui-Gon hadn’t bothered to appear visibly, which didn’t surprise him. His former master seemed to enjoy maintaining his air of mystery, even when there was no one around but Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan no longer found him at all mysterious.  
  
Leaving the soup to fend for itself, he gestured, and the comm by his bed floated over to his hand. He called up the message and held it out to the space Qui-Gon was occupying.  
  
After a moment, Qui-Gon responded, _Well, you knew this was likely to happen from the moment you heard she was working for the rebellion, did you not?_  
  
“I suppose there’s a difference between knowing something, and that something happening.” He returned his attention to his dinner.  
  
_Are you uncertain what she will say to you? Or what you will say to her?_  
  
“Both,” he admitted. “I’ve been…from her perspective, I suppose I’ve been hiding. I can’t imagine she’s too happy with me right now. As for what I’ll say to her…” He stared pensively off to the side, almost feeling like he could see right through the walls and across the dunes. Off in the direction of the Lars-Whitesun-Skywalker household. “Bail told me to be careful.”  
  
_So you will be. Just as you have been all these years._  
  
“But he told her where to find me,” Obi-Wan said. “Bail trusted her to come here, but still told me to be careful. I’m not sure what to make of that.”  
  
_Perhaps that you should judge her for yourself. Maybe Bail isn’t trusting her so much as trusting you._  
  
Judging Ahsoka. Obi-Wan sighed. That called up memories, and not pleasant ones. Less pleasant for her, no doubt. But what choice did he have?  
  
_There is no point in trying to judge her before she is here. You still think too much, Obi-Wan. Let the moment come as it will._  
  
Obi-Wan glared balefully at the spot where Qui-Gon was still stubbornly refusing to appear. “Sometimes I think you’re deliberately trying to annoy me.”  
  
The ripple of Qui-Gon’s laughter suggested he wasn’t entirely wrong. Still, his heart felt a little lighter as he returned to his soup. Qui-Gon was right about one thing, at least: he could not, should not, judge Ahsoka before she was here. And this time, he would listen to her.  


* * *

  
  
She arrived some days later. More than two days, he thought. Fewer than ten, probably. He didn’t always keep close track of every sunrise that passed.  
  
When she knocked on his door, the first thing he sensed was her anger. He hadn’t sensed her presence as she approached. Of course, she must have become good at hiding. But as he heard the sound of a speeder pull up outside, she must have decided to stop shielding, at least to some degree.  
  
He paused, hand hovering halfway to the door handle. What made him hesitate was not that she was angry—he would have been surprised if she wasn’t, and after Bail’s message he’d more or less expected it. Her anger, though, didn’t feel the way he expected anger to feel. There was no sense of hidden darkness, no tightly repressed tension threatening to break free. She shone fierce but bright in the Force, her emotions radiating out like poison bleeding from a wound.  
  
He shook his head and opened the door, and there she was.  
  
The last time he’d seen her had been when she’d left Coruscant to go after Maul on Mandalore. He’d been struck by how much more mature she’d seemed than the previous time he’d seen her, turning her back on the Jedi and walking away. If she’d seemed older and wiser then, it was nothing to how she’d changed now. She was taller, for one thing, probably taller than Obi-Wan himself including her montrals, and clearly an adult instead of barely more than a child. As a teenager, she’d moved confidently; now, she stood as if she was absolutely certain of herself and her place in the world.  
  
Then she tilted her head slightly, considering him, and the illusion shattered. She appeared suddenly uncertain, like she wasn’t sure how to address him, and he saw the girl who had been as close to being his Padawan as anyone who wasn’t actually his Padawan could be.  
  
And then she was stepping forward and, instead of yelling at him like he half expected, she wrapped her arms around him and held on tightly. He was so shocked that he hugged her back before wondering what he was doing.  
  
_Appreciate the moment, Obi-Wan._ He wasn’t sure if the faint murmur was memory or if Qui-Gon was actually there whispering in his ear, but he followed the advice. He held onto Ahsoka, simply glad for the moment that she was there and he hadn’t completely lost her.  
  
_Bail wasn’t entirely wrong, to call her my granddaughter,_ he thought inanely, though before he had time to pursue that thought, he and Ahsoka stepped back and surveyed each other.  
  
He knew that like her, he’d grown older. Knew that the changes didn’t exactly improve his appearance. His hair had gone grey, the color leached out by sun and sand and time. The years and his regrets had worn lines on his face, and he sometimes felt as though the desert was gradually drawing out his life force, leaving him an empty vessel with nothing left except his mission.  
  
She didn’t seem to notice, or care. She was looking at him the way she used to look at her old Master Obi-Wan. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered.  
  
“I know,” he said, and made himself keep meeting her eyes. He knew that she knew what he was admitting: that he hadn’t tried to contact her. That he was keeping secrets.  
  
The silence between them stretched on for several moments, longer than was probably comfortable. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure he was much good at judging such things anymore.  
  
“Are you going to invite me in?” she asked finally.  
  
He stepped back and wordlessly gestured her inside. Her eyes flicked around the small room, and he thought she was probably judging the interior of his hut. He would be, if he were her. It was cramped, and dim after the bright light of the suns, and despite his best efforts there was sand in the corners.  
  
“Would you like some water?” he asked as formally as he could manage, before remembering that she hadn’t spent the past sixteen years on Tatooine and probably didn’t know the local customs of hospitality.  
  
But either she’d done her research or she’d gotten better at going with what she was given, because she said, “I would be honored.”  
  
They sat as his table and drank water drawn from the cisterns he kept in the cool space under the house. At least he’d managed to keep the sand out of the glasses.  
  
She set her glass down with a small but audible sound. “Bail told you I was coming.”  
  
“Yes.” He didn’t see any point in denying it.  
  
“He told you not to trust me, didn’t he?”  
  
Obi-Wan hesitated. “Not…precisely.”  
  
“What, precisely, did he tell you?”  
  
He looked at her for a moment, then got up and went to the table by his bed for the comm that held the message he still hadn’t erased. Maybe some part of him had sensed that she’d want to see it. He handed it to her.  
  
She read it, stared at it long enough that she must have read it three or four times. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her face gave nothing away, and she was no longer broadcasting any of her emotions.  
  
“It’s understandable he doesn’t trust me,” she said, in a voice that was almost monotone. She set the comm aside. “I fought a Sith, and both of us came out of it alive.”  
  
“Ahsoka…” He wasn’t truly sure what he was going to say.  
  
“Why?” And suddenly the anger was back in her voice, and her eyes were blazing. “Did you truly think I would never face him? Did you think it would be better if I had to guess? To meet him and feel him under all that pain and hate, and tell myself I was imagining things, try to believe it wasn’t true, until we were face to face and I couldn’t deny it anymore? Do you have any idea what that was like?”  
  
He thought of watching the news broadcasts in the cantina his first year on Tatooine, the slow sickening realization that the creature he’d fought on Mustafar hadn’t perished. “Perhaps some idea.”  
  
“And what did you think he would do, when he found me? When he knew for sure that I was alive, and I didn’t know who he was yet?”  
  
“He…didn’t kill you,” he said. It sounded weak even to his ears. He wasn’t sure he had a better answer, and could only vaguely remember thinking, when Bail told him she was alive, that she was strong enough to deal with Sith and there was no reason for her to feel the way he did every day.  
  
“He tried,” she said. “Did you think he wouldn’t?”  
  
“Sith have tried to kill you before, and you always survived.”  
  
She gave him an incredulous look. “This wasn’t just a Sith. It was Anakin.”  
  
He flinched, and tried to hide it. “He’s not Anakin anymore.”  
  
“Yes, he is!” Her eyes flashed, and then she took a deep breath and continued in a much calmer voice. “He is. He always has been. But he’s not a Sith. Not anymore.”  
  
Obi-Wan stared at her, trying to make sense of the words. Had she gone insane? Was that why Bail had warned him? But surely he would have found a clearer way to say so, if that was the case. Was she simply confused, or lying to herself? That didn’t sound like Ahsoka, but obviously something had happened to her, and after all he hadn’t seen her for sixteen years.  
  
“You don’t believe me,” she said. “I figured you wouldn’t, after what Bail said. You should let me tell you the whole story. I promised myself I would do that before yelling at you.”  
  
Yes, as he’d suspected. He probably deserved the yelling. He wasn’t sure about whatever she intended to say first. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. But I…” He trailed off, trying to remember how Qui-Gon had phrased it and how he could say that to her.  
  
She watched him closely. “Will you let me tell the whole story, then?”  
  
He suddenly realized that not all the intensity of her stare had to do with judging him. Bail hadn’t given a time frame, but it couldn’t have been that long since she’d encountered…him. Vader. He wondered what he would be thinking or how he would be acting, if he had been the one to meet Vader just weeks ago at most.  
  
He nodded, and saw her take a deep breath, the way they were taught as younglings to clear their minds.  
  
“We went to Malachor,” she said at last, and his stomach lurched unpleasantly. Malachor was a name out of old Jedi ghost stories.  
  
“We…?” he asked, to avoid picturing her too clearly in the middle of some of those stories.  
  
“Me and some other rebels.” She gave him a half-hearted smile, and he knew that in any other circumstances she would be mocking him for keeping secrets from her by keeping secrets of her own. “We needed…well, never mind, it’s a long story and it’s not so important right now. We had good reason, or I wouldn’t have let them go. I was already pretty sure about Anakin then. I’d been gathering information on him for almost a year.”  
  
Obi-Wan swallowed, picturing that, the reasons for Ahsoka’s anger sinking in more and more clearly. He could imagine all too well her researching, finding information that kept confirming her suspicions. And it had led her to Malachor. “The others with you,” he said. “Are they…?”  
  
“They’re alive,” she said. She hesitated. “One of them was…pretty badly hurt. Not by Anakin, though. By Maul.”  
  
Obi-Wan nearly knocked his empty water cup off the table.  
  
“Yes,” she said. “I should warn you about him, if Bail didn’t. He was on Malachor too, and I think he’d been there a while. I don’t know if he managed to survive and get off the planet, but knowing him he probably did. I have no idea where he is now.”  
  
Obi-Wan sighed, but it didn’t actually significantly change what he knew about Maul. “All right. And Vader?” He couldn’t say Anakin, the way she had. Not when, no matter what she said, he couldn’t possibly still be Anakin. Not truly.  
  
“We fought.”  
  
He listened as she told him the whole story of their encounter on Malachor—how they’d fought in the Sith temple, allowing her companions to get away. (She remained vague about the details of these companions, but he supposed he couldn’t blame her.) How she hadn’t been exactly planning to face him then, but had been expecting she would eventually, and so had he. How she’d tried to deny who he was right up until she’d cut a hole in his mask and heard him call her name in his true voice, and Obi-Wan was rather impressed that she’d managed to get close enough in a fight with him to do that. Of course, she’d always been good. She’d never have made it as Anakin’s Padawan if she wasn’t.  
  
Then she told him about the temple collapsing on them, and being buried underneath the rubble with Vader, and how they’d had to work together to get out. How she’d sensed him as a Sith, and sensed his signature in the Force changing as they dug themselves out, becoming less Sith-like. Or at least, she believed he had changed. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure if he could believe it.  
  
And she told him how Palpatine had been waiting when they reached the surface of Malachor, and despite the heat of Tatooine, Obi-Wan felt a shiver run down his spine as she explained about being taken to Mustafar and tortured. She spoke in such a dispassionate voice then that it had to be a careful effort.  
  
He wasn’t sure what to think when she said that Anakin had freed her and let her go. She said it was because—well, she believed what she believed. But Sith didn’t turn back from the dark side. They just didn’t. And it certainly wasn’t unusual for a Sith to turn against his master. That part made perfect sense. But why would he have let her go?  
  
Unless she was right. But she couldn’t be. Could she? It would mean…  
  
“Here.” Ahsoka held out a datapad.  
  
He took it, frowning in confusion. He could see it had multiple files open on it. “What is this?”  
  
“I know you’ll want proof,” she said. “This is the best I can give you, short of actually tracking him down. It’s everything I found since I got back.”  
  
He flicked through the datapad, which turned out to contain an impressive assortment of reports, ships’ logs, postings from the Holonet, and even what appeared to be classified Imperial briefings. All related to Vader, and he could see even at a glance that the common theme was Vader’s apparent disappearance from Palpatine’s service and his failure to reappear anywhere else.  
  
“This is…thorough,” he said, skimming through what appeared to be a recording of some gossipy pirates picked up by the security cameras of the ship they had boarded.  
  
“I did used to be in charge of rebel intelligence,” she said. “I may not be anymore, but I can still gather information.”  
  
In charge of rebel intelligence. He hadn’t actually known exactly what she did for the rebellion, although it didn’t surprise him that she’d been high up in their organization. In charge of intelligence, though, did surprise him. From what he remembered of her, he’d have thought she’d rather plunge straight into the middle of fighting than stay back and sift through information. But it had been a long time since he’d seen her, he reminded himself. And Order 66 had changed them all.  
  
He flipped to an official Imperial notification, marked to be limited to star destroyer commanders only, warning that Lord Vader was no longer to be trusted or considered part of Imperial command. He couldn’t deny that from all these reports, it seemed she was telling the truth about Vader abandoning the Emperor at the very least. Could she possibly be right about the rest of it?  
  
He stood abruptly and went over to the chest in the corner of the room. He could feel her curious gaze on him as he took out the lightsaber, unconsciously turning it over and over in his hands as if it could reveal all the answers to him.  
  
Ahsoka drew in a sharp breath when he set the lightsaber on the table in front of her. She reached out as if to touch it, then hesitated, her hand hovering in the air above it as though afraid to make contact. He couldn’t blame her if she was, even though psychometry had never been a strength for either of them.  
  
“How…?” she asked, and then paused to take a deep breath. Now that it came to it, she seemed scared to actually hear the answer. She asked anyway. “How do you have this?”  
  
“We fought,” he said, making himself look up to meet her eyes. “I had to stop him, after what he did. I went into the Jedi temple, after he was through in there. He killed them all. Jedi. Padawans, initiates, younglings, anyone he could. The whole temple was filled with their bodies, and with the pain of their deaths. And he left the security feeds. I watched him do it, him and his clone troopers.”  
  
She hadn’t appeared at all surprised as he spoke, suggesting she knew or guessed all this already. But the mention of the clone troopers seemed to spark something. “The clones were forced.”  
  
“Order 66,” he said. “I know. But Anakin wasn’t. I tracked him to Mustafar.”  
  
“Mustafar,” she muttered, looking like she was putting together a few pieces and wasn’t particularly happy with it.  
  
“Anakin made his decision,” Obi-Wan said. “I tried to reason with him. He wouldn’t listen.”  
  
He’d said as much to himself over and over again, and to Qui-Gon as well. How much, he wondered as he always did, was true, and how much was he simply justifying his own actions to himself? Ahsoka appeared to accept it, though, which perhaps said something.  
  
“He wouldn’t listen to Padmé, either,” Obi-Wan said before he could stop himself, and then bit his tongue in an attempt to draw the words back. He shouldn’t be mentioning Padmé, not if he didn’t want Ahsoka to be asking questions about her.  
  
Sure enough, that got her attention. “Padmé?”  
  
“Not important,” he said quickly. “It didn’t work.”  
  
From the way her eyes narrowed, he didn’t think she actually intended to forget the subject, but she did drop it for the time being. “So you tried to stop him.”  
  
“By any means necessary,” Obi-Wan confirmed. “We fought.”  
  
“You won.”  
  
His first reaction was to ask how she knew that, but then he realized it was fairly obvious. “I didn’t kill him,” he said instead, even though that was even more obvious.  
  
“Why not?” she asked, and there was neither accusation nor approval in her voice as far as he could tell. Just simple curiosity.  
  
“I thought I was leaving him for dead. I should have been leaving him for dead. He really shouldn’t have…” Once again he saw the burning surface of Mustafar and whatever remained of Anakin screaming at him in hatred.  
  
“You couldn’t kill him either.”  
  
“That’s not entirely true.” Sometimes he thought he’d feel better about himself if he could be sure he truly couldn’t have brought himself to kill Anakin. “I knew what I was doing when I left him there. Or I thought I knew. I should have actually finished it.”  
  
“How…” She trailed off, and he could see her thinking. “Palpatine got to him before he could die, didn’t he? How fast would he have had to get there?”  
  
“Fast.” Obi-Wan had wondered the same thing himself. “Does it really matter, though? He was manipulating us all.”  
  
He saw Ahsoka’s face set in hard lines, and realized it mattered to her. Whatever wisdom or strength or despair the years had brought her, they hadn’t taken away the resolve and defiance that had led her to jump into righteous battle. He, on the other hand, had been tempered by the desert and the empty years to acknowledge and accept what was beyond his power. He wondered which of the two of them had the right of it, if either of them did.  
  
“Did he kill Padmé?” she asked. “Anakin, I mean. Did he kill her?”  
  
Obi-Wan hesitated. The answer wasn’t quite yes, and whatever else he’d done, it didn’t feel right to let Ahsoka believe he had. On the other hand, the answer wasn’t quite no either, and if he did say no, she would have questions he wasn’t sure he should answer.  
  
Ahsoka’s look became more pointed, a sharp reminder that she had come here angry at him for keeping secrets. And the longer he stayed silent, the clearer it was that he wasn’t telling her everything.  
  
“She died of injuries he caused,” he said finally. It wasn’t entirely untrue.  
  
“In a lot of ways, you haven’t changed,” she said, sounding extremely unimpressed, and he winced. She didn’t seem to have changed much either, at least when it came to her tolerance for equivocating statements. “What aren’t you telling me?”  
  
“Would it be enough if I said that some things, it might not do any good for you to know?”  
  
“No.”  
  
He sighed. He hadn’t really thought that would work. He stared down at Ahsoka’s datapad, still on the table in front of him.  
  
“You still don’t believe me about Anakin, do you?” she asked.  
  
“I…I’m not sure what to think.” That much, at least, was the truth. “I need to meditate on this.”  
  
She nodded. “All right. Fine. Do that. Read all those reports. I suppose that’s really all I can do.”  
  
She suddenly sounded exhausted, and he looked over to see her shoulders sagging. For the first time she appeared almost defeated, and he more than halfway wanted to reach out and reassure her.  
  
He wouldn’t know how to go about it, though. And nothing he said would be honest until he could work out what his opinion actually was. She had made it this far without him; she didn’t need him in this moment either.  
  
He took her datapad and retreated, as much as it was possible to retreat in his small house, leaving her the freedom of his kitchen and the dunes outside. She didn’t make any move to disturb him as he carefully and thoroughly read through all the information she’d gathered, or as he set the datapad aside and went out to the shaded hollow behind the house to sink into meditation. She must have learned patience sometime in the past sixteen years. Although to be fair, she may have learned that even before, back when she had walked away from the Jedi.  
  
He closed his eyes and let his awareness spread out into the desert, let the gathering evening wash over him, as he tried to sort through the information she’d given him.  
  
Could it be true? There was enough on her datapad to give convincing evidence Vader had turned against Palpatine. Could everything else Ahsoka claimed be true as well?  
  
Obi-Wan had always believed that once a Jedi fully committed to the dark side, there was no coming back. Hadn’t he? At least, he had always believed it about Anakin. After everything Anakin had done, how could he come back?  
  
Jedi could become Sith, though. Why not the other way around? And after all, hadn’t some—like Ventress—left the Sith path? Even Maul had, in his own way. But Maul was certainly still fully immersed in the dark side. And Ventress could hardly be called a light sider, and anyway she hadn’t left that path by choice. And he knew why Jedi could become Sith, but why they couldn’t necessarily turn back. It was easy to give in to darker emotions, and having allowed emotions to rule your decisions once, it was that much easier to do it again. It was infinitely harder to summon the discipline and will to get those emotions under control.  
  
Harder didn’t mean impossible though, did it? And perhaps he was being too hard on Ventress. Perhaps she had come farther than he was allowing himself to believe. And there had been other Jedi, he knew, others who had stumbled or strayed from the light side but had come back.   
  
But had any of them gone as far in the dark side as Anakin had? Anakin never did anything by halves. He’d committed himself wholeheartedly to the Sith, and Obi-Wan had seen the results with his own eyes. Had seen what remained of the Jedi temple. Had heard, from his hiding place here on Tatooine, the reports of Vader’s devastation and fear across the galaxy. Of the people he’d massacred and enslaved. If Anakin had gone that far, did he truly have the strength for another complete turnaround?  
  
Anakin was one of the strongest people Obi-Wan knew. Or he had been. But did anyone have the strength for that?  
  
He hadn’t sensed any trace of lies from Ahsoka, no hint of deceit or uncertainty or even the vague unease he’d often felt around Anakin in the later days of the Clone Wars that he’d dismissed as general anxiety. Even so, could he be certain of what he felt from her? He thought he would be, if this was Ahsoka sixteen or seventeen years ago. But so much had changed since then. She had, too. How much, truly?  
  
Could it be true?  
  
_Do you want it to be true?_  
  
He opened his eyes. Qui-Gon was there, appearing to sit on the sand before Obi-Wan, his eyes intent and his tone serious. His bluish form was slightly transparent today, and rippling slightly as if stirred by the faint evening breeze, but there was no mistaking his presence in the Force.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
_I know as well as you do what it would mean, if it were true,_ Qui-Gon said.  
  
“If he truly could return from the dark side…” Obi-Wan said hesitantly, “of course it would be good.”  
  
_Yes,_ Qui-Gon said. _But it would mean he did it without you. That you weren’t enough to bring him back—or that you left him to darkness when perhaps you could have helped. I could assure you that it isn’t true, but my reassurances mean very little against what you might feel in this matter._  
  
Obi-Wan closed his eyes. Qui-Gon was right—all of those thoughts had crossed his mind, as Ahsoka was telling her story. Her words had stirred up all the questions and doubts he thought he’d settled over the long years it took to accept what Anakin had become. Now he was uncertain all over again, but he had reached a point of acceptance, once.  
  
He took a deep breath, then another and another, until he fell into the rhythm of light meditation. Qui-Gon remained before him, more patient than he’d ever been in life. Finally Obi-Wan spoke, keeping his voice low and his breathing steady. “I’ve gone over what happened so many times. I made mistakes. But for my part, none of my mistakes were unforgivable. Anakin was manipulated. But he also made choices, choices he did not have to make. And when he made those choices, was there anything I could have done to change his mind? No. I don’t think there was. Not in that moment. Before, maybe, but I was also misled, and my mistakes were not malicious ones. Could I have done anything else in that moment? Not and remain a Jedi, and true to my own choices.”  
  
He opened his eyes to see Qui-Gon smiling slightly, and it took him a moment to realize it was a look of pride.  
  
_Yes,_ Qui-Gon said. _I agree. And you have done far better at understanding that than I ever did. But that isn’t all of it, is it?_  
  
“No,” Obi-Wan said. It wasn’t. After all, it had been long years since his last fight with Anakin. And if Ahsoka was right, was there something else he could have done, even after their fight?  
  
And that was if Ahsoka was right. She might not be. Which would mean he had still lost Anakin, and he may lose Ahsoka as well. He had to do whatever was necessary to protect Luke, and whatever he could to help Bail and Breha protect Leia.  
  
_Do you want it to be true?_ Qui-Gon asked again.  
  
“It would be easier if he were truly gone,” Obi-Wan admitted. The quiet words fell into the desert air like stones. He let them die away before speaking again. “But easier is not the Jedi way. Yes, I do want it to be true. And that’s why I’m so afraid to believe it.”  
  
Qui-Gon reached out, and a moment later there was a ripple of air as if he had touched Obi-Wan’s shoulder. _You have always been wiser than you realized, my Padawan, even when you were getting into the most ridiculous sorts of trouble. Think on what you know, and trust your heart and the Force._  
  
“And whose fault was it that I was in those ridiculous situations in the first place?” he retorted, then quickly sobered again. “Ahsoka brought enough evidence to prove that he left Palpatine’s service. His motivations, though…beyond her word, there’s no way to know for sure.” He sighed. “You’re part of the Force. Couldn’t you go find him and see for sure?” He was only partly joking.  
  
Qui-Gon didn’t laugh. _Even if I could, and did, you would still be relying on someone else’s word. Trust me or trust Ahsoka…you have the same reasons to believe either of us, or not. You must decide for yourself, or part of you will always wonder._  
  
He was probably right, which was annoying. “I do want to believe Ahsoka. But I’m not sure I can. There’s so much at stake.”  
  
_So become sure._ Qui-Gon, apparently deciding he’d said all he needed to at that time, faded from view, his words floating behind him. Obi-Wan suspected he’d return if he called for him, but decided to take the less than subtle hint for what it was.  
  
He went back inside, and found that Ahsoka had managed to put together something resembling dinner from his meager store of supplies. By unspoken agreement, neither of them brought up Anakin or Jedi or Sith or any serious matters at all. They ate mostly in silence, but it was more or less a comfortable one. The meal she’d made wasn’t particularly great, but it wasn’t terrible either, and she hadn’t had much to work with.  
  
He insisted that she take his bed for the night. He still had far more to think and meditate about before he could even contemplate sleeping, and anyway he’d slept on far worse than his floor. She likely only agreed in the end because he clearly had no intention of sleeping for a while, and she was at that point nearly staggering with exhaustion. How long had she been going without real rest, anyway? Obi-Wan wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He somehow doubted she’d found anything truly restful for a very long time.  
  
He went back outside, staring out at the stars and the rising moons. Qui-Gon, if he was there, was as silent as the desert air, cool now after dark.  
  
Trusting Ahsoka. That’s what it came down to in the end. That’s what it had to come down to. Did he believe her? From what he knew of her, from what he sensed in the Force, from what he could bring himself to believe about Anakin, did he truly believe she was telling the truth and not mistaken or lying to herself? He couldn’t even blame her if she was.  
  
He closed his eyes and sank back into a meditative trance. This time he let his awareness wash back over his house, brushing against Ahsoka’s consciousness, now sound asleep in his bed. He didn’t push further or try to disturb her. He sat there, examining every bit of what he could sense from her, running through every moment he had spent with her from the first time she stepped off that ship on Christophsis to the last time he’d seen her departing for Mandalore. He considered his own biases and mistakes and judgments. Remembered Anakin, as a child and a Padawan and a friend and an enemy. Weighed the secrets he kept and what they meant.  
  
He wanted to trust her. His instincts were telling him to trust her, responding to the girl who had once been close enough to him to be called his family. The girl she wasn’t anymore, except for how she still felt like the same person under everything else.  
  
_Trust the Force,_ he heard inside his head, and it was his own voice speaking to him, not Qui-Gon’s.  
  
“All right,” he whispered to the sand and the sky.  
  
He stood up and went back inside, pausing for a moment to look at the dim outline of Ahsoka’s shoulders and montrals in his bed. Her breathing was deep and steady, and, fast asleep, she radiated peace, security, and light in the Force.  
  
_All right,_ he thought. _I’ve trusted the Force all my life. I won’t stop now._  


* * *

  
  
Between the Jedi and the rebellion, Ahsoka had long since developed the habit of cataloguing her location even before opening her eyes when she woke up, especially if it was somewhere unfamiliar. The first thing she noticed upon waking this time was someone watching her, and not just physically. Through the Force. Although she didn’t sense any hostility.  
  
Hot. Dry. Surprisingly comfortable bed. Sand between her clothes and her skin, ugh. Tatooine. Obi-Wan’s house in the middle of the desert. Presumably Obi-Wan was the one watching her. She opened her eyes and sat up.  
  
Obi-Wan was not the one watching her. She stopped midway through pushing the blankets back to stare at the person hovering by the foot of the bed. And he was literally hovering there, not to mention glowing white-blue and, on closer look, vaguely translucent. She made herself ignore all that and focus on the details. He was a human male, long hair, pale skin, Jedi robes. And, she realized, there was a faint sense of familiarity about him, which was probably why she’d thought he was Obi-Wan.  
  
She frowned at him, the Jedi robes prompting her to mentally flick through a few particular memories. In the end, it wasn’t the official archives she remembered that gave her the clue she needed, but the memory of some of Obi-Wan’s personal holos Anakin had showed her once. “Qui-Gon Jinn?”  
  
A smile rippled through the Force, appearing on his face a heartbeat later. When he spoke, she could feel his words more than hear them. _Ahsoka. I’ve been hoping for the chance to meet you._  
  
“What…” She cut herself off, discarding that and several other questions. It seemed pointless to ask what he was. He positively radiated a sense of Jedi, an indefinable quality she’d once been intimately familiar with, ruling out the possibility of this being a trick. And that left only the options that he was some sort of ghost, or that she was experiencing a full-sensory hallucination. She wasn’t going to rule out the latter possibility, but figured it made the most sense to proceed as if the former were true. And her next question would have been what he was doing there, which was equally pointless. If the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn existed, the most logical place for him to be was with Obi-Wan.  
  
“Is this sort of thing common?” she finally asked, with a gesture that took in his glowing, translucent form.  
  
_Not really,_ he said, his smile widening. _Though perhaps more than you might think._  
  
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’ve met Sith ghosts, although I thought those might be confined to the Sith temple. I’ve never met any Jedi ghosts before. Can I call you a ghost, or do you prefer something different?”  
  
He shrugged, and again she felt the sensation in the Force a moment before she saw the movement in his glowing body. _Ghost is fine. Obi-Wan has called me worse, when he gets upset. You’re remarkably calm about my presence._  
  
She crossed her arms. “Like I said, I met Sith ghosts. You’re not actively trying to kill me, which makes a nice change.”  
  
_On Malachor?_ he asked, and at her look, added without the slightest hint of contrition, _I was listening in on your conversation last night._  
  
“You’re not going to apologize for that?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.  
  
_I’m not particularly sorry._  
  
She found herself laughing. “Well, all right then. I suppose I’ve done my share of eavesdropping. Do you make a habit of it?”  
  
_When I was alive, of course,_ he said. _How else was I going to find out what the Council planned to get up to?_  
  
She smiled at that, and then gave in to curiosity. “Can other people become ghosts, or is it just Jedi and Sith?”  
  
He seemed slightly surprised by the question. _I have no idea. To be honest, until you mentioned the Sith ghosts, I thought only Jedi could do it._  
  
“There were definitely Sith ghosts trying to kill me,” she told him. “But I guess they might not have been ghosts in the same way you are. I don’t know how much they could actually think.”  
  
_Well, I certainly don’t claim to know everything about the Force even now,_ he said. _It’s an intriguing question. I am part of the Force, perhaps you might say a more specifically defined part of the Force. It’s possible these Sith spirits are bound to the temple, as you suggested. Chained echoes, if you will, achieving an apparently similar effect through the exact opposite means as a Jedi, binding rather than letting go. Fascinating._  
  
“I suddenly understand so much more about why Obi-Wan is the way he is,” she said dryly.  
  
Qui-Gon, who had been fading slightly from view as he rambled to himself, snapped back into focus. _Oh, I assure you he found me unspeakably annoying. He still does, at times._  
  
She glanced around. Other than herself and Qui-Gon, the house appeared to be empty—she couldn’t hear or sense anyone beyond the open bedroom door. “Where is he, anyway?”  
  
Qui-Gon nodded towards the door, a very odd gesture to see from a ghost. _Outside checking the moisture collectors._  
  
“Did he sleep at all last night?”  
  
_A few hours,_ Qui-Gon said. _Ordinarily I’d tell him to take better care of himself, but…_  
  
“But I gave him a lot to think about,” Ahsoka finished.  
  
_Yes, certainly,_ he said. _And Obi-Wan always has struggled with the emotional side of Jedi teachings._  
  
Ahsoka gave him a startled look. “Obi-Wan?”  
  
_Oh, yes._ A feeling of fond affection, tinged very slightly with exasperation, flowed out from Qui-Gon’s ghost. _Allowing himself to feel emotions, while not letting his feelings cloud his judgment or make him angry—that’s never come easily. Remind me to tell you about the incident with the Dilanian prince sometime. Mind you, these days he’s a better Jedi than I ever was._  
  
“You don’t have to defend Obi-Wan to me,” she said. “I’m angry at him, but not for however good he is at being a Jedi. In any case, I’m not one to judge.”  
  
_Because you left the Order._ He peered at her intently. _I can’t fault you for doing so, under the circumstances. Though I wonder how much uncertainty it’s left you regarding the Jedi order and your own training._  
  
He said it in a tone of voice that indicated he knew very well all of what had gone through her mind on the subject. Too well. “How do you…?”  
  
He drifted a little closer, and appeared to settle beside her on the bed. _I was already knighted and had a Padawan of my own when my master left the Order. We had our differences, but we had a certain similarity of attitude, and a successful partnership that was naturally concluded when he knighted me. And yet…_ He hesitated, staring off into the distance, seeming to see something other than the bare walls of Obi-Wan’s bedroom.  
  
Dooku had been Qui-Gon’s master, Ahsoka remembered. She’d known that, but until now, actually talking to Qui-Gon, she’d never had reason to think of it in anything other than abstract terms.  
  
_I had already died when I learned he’d fallen to the dark side,_ Qui-Gon continued. _Perhaps I should not have cared, but I did. I am part of the Force, but I am also myself, and to see what became of him was not easy. For his sake or for mine. And even knowing I was not responsible for his decisions, I could not help but ask questions of myself._  
  
“Like if you could have done anything differently?” Ahsoka murmured, not really a question. She let his words sink in, and realized—Dooku had been his master. He did understand. “And whether what you learned from him was…corrupted.”  
  
_Yes,_ Qui-Gon said quietly. _All of it. I never was the best Jedi, you know. At least according to the Council, most of the time._  
  
The part about the Council was said with a wry twist that suggested he had his own opinions on it, although she sensed barely hidden self-disparagement underneath.  
  
“Obi-Wan only ever had good things to say about you,” she said.  
  
_Obi-Wan is kinder to me than I deserve,_ he said. _But he is right about this, at least. Dooku became a Sith, but he was still a Jedi when he taught me. Just as Anakin was when he taught you._  
  
She nodded. It was not a new thought for her, but somehow it was different hearing it from someone who had been through the same questions, for the same reasons. “I couldn’t control Anakin’s choices,” she said slowly, thinking hard as she spoke aloud. “They were his own. But it wasn’t because of any natural flaw in him. He chose wrong. So did Dooku.”  
  
_Dooku was right about a fair number of things as well,_ Qui-Gon said. _And even if we chose different paths, many of my more unorthodox leanings were due in part to things I learned from him._  
  
“That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”  
  
_No. It doesn’t._ Qui-Gon gave her that odd smile that rippled through the Force. _I did often say there was more than one way to follow the Jedi Code._  
  
Ahsoka smiled back, and felt a small bundle of stress she hadn’t known she’d been carrying dissolve and fade away. “Maybe Anakin taught me to be unorthodox as well. But not everything he did was wrong. A lot he did was right, and he taught me how to make decisions for myself.”  
  
_I may not be one to pass any sort of judgment, but I’d say you’ve been doing fairly well at that._  
  
She frowned at him. “Just how much of my life have you been spying on?”  
  
_Oh, not nearly that much. I’ve spent far more time around Obi-Wan._ He hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to say something more, but didn’t in the end.  
  
She sighed. “How about this. Next time you feel the need to look in on me—even if it’s _not that much_—you actually talk to me. I don’t mind ghosts as long as they’re not trying to kill me, but I do mind people who are supposedly my friends sneaking around and not telling me things.”  
  
He managed to appear embarrassed. _I take your point._  
  
She got out of bed and found her boots. “I should go find Obi-Wan. Thank you. For telling me about Dooku.” She smiled a little. “And maybe for someday telling me about the incident with the Dilanian prince.”  
  
He nodded acknowledgement, eyes sparkling in a way that couldn’t be just the sunlight drifting through the window, and watched as she put on her boots and went to the door. She didn’t mind. At least he wasn’t lurking invisibly.  
  
_Ahsoka,_ he called just before she left the house.  
  
She paused, turning back to him.  
  
_Did you want to leave the Jedi?_  
  
Anakin had asked her something similar, she reflected. And it wasn’t anything she hadn’t asked herself many times before. And she was pretty sure that Qui-Gon already knew whatever answer she might give.  
  
She looked back at him, meeting his eyes for a long moment as she reached out in the Force. His presence was a deep, vibrant hum against the background murmur of life, almost like a tangle of flowering vines, but somehow still rooted and reassuring. He reminded her of Obi-Wan, but even more, she realized, he reminded her of Plo Koon. She acknowledged that pain, breathed it in, breathed out the new sense of connection and understanding he’d given her. She didn’t remember him when he’d been alive, had only arrived at the temple a few months before he’d died. She hadn’t thought she’d ever meet him. She was glad she had.  
  
“It was the only choice I could have made,” she said, knowing it didn’t really answer his question.  
  
He didn’t push her to do so. She knew he wasn’t the one who needed that answer. But she could feel him reaching back in the Force, could feel that he genuinely did enjoy talking to her as much as she’d appreciated the chance to meet him. She hadn’t known that Jedi ghosts could exist, but perhaps there was something to be said for them.  
  
She could feel him dissolve back into the Force as she stepped out into the sun to find Obi-Wan, although she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last time she’d see him.  
  
The second sun was rising, following the first up into the sky. She shaded her eyes and peered across the sand outside the little hut, finally spotting a dark figure near some equipment that must be the moisture collectors.  
  
She found Obi-Wan, wrench in hand, doing what she strongly suspected was unnecessary repair work to the moisture collectors. Not that she was going to call him on it. She did much the same thing on her ship.  
  
“Qui-Gon told me I’d find you out here,” she said instead.  
  
He paused, the wrench resting over the bolt he’d been tightening as he turned to her. “So you spoke to him then.”  
  
“I woke up to find him practically hovering on top of me.”  
  
“Ah,” said Obi-Wan. “Yes. He does that sometimes.”  
  
“Is that just since he’s been a ghost?” she asked. “Or was he like that when you were his Padawan as well?”  
  
A faint trace of a smile passed over Obi-Wan’s face. “What do you think?”  
  
She smiled back, and nearly said that she didn’t envy him his apprenticeship. Except she found herself turning the words over in her head, letting them sink in like the suns’ light sinking into the sand, and instead spoke a truth she’d never quite realized, or acknowledged. “I think I still would have preferred your apprenticeship to mine. Not because of Qui-Gon or Anakin. But I should never have had to lead armies in battle.”  
  
Obi-Wan stared intently at her for a moment, as if trying to read her mind, although she felt nothing from the Force. All signs of the smile were gone from his face. “No,” he said quietly. “None of us should have.”  
  
He turned back to the bolt and finished tightening it, then reached down and picked up one of the jars at his feet. A small amount of liquid sloshed in the bottom of it as he handed it to Ahsoka.  
  
“If you would be so kind as to carry this?” He picked up a second jar himself, stowing the wrench in his pocket, and gestured back towards his house. They made their way back across the sand in silence.  
  
Once they were safely back inside, he turned to her and spread his arms as if in invitation. “I believe you wanted to yell at me.”  
  
She had wanted to yell at him. She remembered wanting that, remembered how her anger had felt. But somehow she couldn’t quite summon the fire she needed for that anymore.  
  
She sighed and went to sit down at the table, bowing her head. “I’m still angry at you. For not telling me about Anakin. For letting me find that out on my own.”  
  
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him wince.  
  
“Mostly,” she said, “I’m angry you let me believe you were dead. I do still want to yell at you, but more than that—” She stared down at her hands on her knees, and said another truth out loud. “I just want to not be so alone.”  
  
There was a moment of silence, and he stepped closer to sit down beside her. “Ahsoka.” He reached out to take one of her hands in his.  
  
She let herself grip his fingers tightly, focusing on that point of contact, on the way he’d reached out to her.  
  
“I spent a long time telling myself that the Anakin I knew had died,” Obi-Wan said. “Thinking of it any other way was…intolerable. Because I couldn’t get through to him. And if that’s not the case, then…then I’m not sure how to react.”  
  
“Neither am I, to be honest. But I told the truth about what happened.”  
  
“I believe you.”  
  
She looked up quickly. He looked absolutely shattered at the admission, but she could hear that he meant it, and without even the doubt that had been there for Bail and Hera and Kanan. He trusted her.  
  
She took a deep breath and felt it catch in her throat. Felt the tears threatening to rise and choke her, and this time he was the one who reached out to hug her. She sank into the embrace gratefully. He believed her, and he was her friend and her former master’s master no matter how many years had come between them, and he was still Obi-Wan. She hadn’t lost him.  
  
When she managed to get herself back under control, she told him, “If it helps at all, I think it was chance that I was able to reach him. If the temple hadn’t caved in and trapped us, I wouldn’t have had time to figure out what to say to get him to question Palpatine. And in the end he had to make the choice for himself.”  
  
While she was being tortured, and it was also chance that he had made that choice before Palpatine had killed her. She figured she didn’t need to say that.  
  
“What did you say to him?” Obi-Wan asked, voice suddenly loaded with as many emotions as she felt. “What was it, that got him to listen?”  
  
“I said a lot of things to him,” she said. She’d gone back over every bit of their conversation, and what she could remember of what he’d said when he’d rescued her from the cell on Mustafar. “About the Jedi and the Sith, Padmé and you and the clones. And I’m pretty sure it was Order 66. He didn’t believe me about the control chips at first, but I think he went to verify it for himself.”  
  
“Slave chips,” Obi-Wan murmured, and she nodded agreement.  
  
He got up after a moment, and started working in the kitchen. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but a few minutes later he returned with two cups, and she almost laughed when he set one down in front of her and she realized he’d made tea. It even smelled almost exactly like the tea he used to make back in the Jedi temple. Where he’d gotten the leaves she had no idea, and it seemed almost absurd to be drinking tea here on Tatooine, but for just a moment it was almost like she was home again.  
  
“Thank you,” she whispered, staring down into the dark liquid.  
  
“Ahsoka,” he said, and waited for her to look up at him. “I know I kept you in the dark about my survival. That was a choice I made, and perhaps it was the wrong one. But please know that you will always have a place in my home should you need it, and you always have my friendship. For what little it might be worth.”  
  
It was so nearly exactly what she needed to hear. “It’s worth a lot.”  
  
“Even if my home is no more than a sandy pile of rocks?” He gave her a tentative smile, not quite his old grin but still genuine.  
  
“My home is a spaceship. That’s not the important part. You have my friendship as well.” She hesitated. “But you’re still not telling me all of the truth, are you?”  
  
“What do you mean?” But his eyes skittered away from hers, and he suddenly looked ten times more awkward than he had.  
  
“Please, Obi-Wan. Don’t try to pretend you’re not still keeping secrets. I’m not that stupid.”  
  
“No,” he admitted. “You’re not.” He spent several moments giving his tea far more attention than it deserved, and finally set the cup down with a resigned sort of _clink_. “You told me that you were responsible for rebel intelligence. Surely you must understand that some secrets can do more harm than good, no matter who you tell. Some secrets are not mine to tell.”  
  
She eyed him. “If the past is any indication, I will find out sooner or later. You know that, right?”  
  
He shrugged, rotated his cup slightly, and met her eyes. He wasn’t going to tell, she realized, reading the determination on his face.  
  
Maybe he was right. She did understand that some secrets were better left secrets. Sometimes you could trust a person, but there might still be information they didn’t need to know. She wasn’t convinced that’s what this was, though. Directing rebel intelligence was one thing, but her instincts were screaming at her that whatever he was hiding was more personal than that.  
  
But what choice did she have? She was no Sith, to torture and coerce the information out of him. She could choose to be angry at him, and bitter, and resent his lies and secrets. It was very nearly a given that she would be angry when she found out what he was hiding. It would probably hurt all the more for his having kept the secret for so long, even keeping it now. She wanted to get angry in advance, wanted the bitterness and cynicism to insulate her against that future pain.  
  
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them he was still watching her quietly. His grey hair curled limply in several directions, as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it in days, and his face was old and lined, but the Force around him sang of light and peace and familiarity.  
  
For a moment, she let herself focus on her anger. On how righteous it felt, and how reassuring the resentment would be. How safe. How easy.  
  
She let it go. It would hurt in the future, that was true. She could feel the echo of that pain now, layered over the present pain of him choosing to keep secrets from her. It would hurt more later.  
  
She had accepted Palpatine’s torture. She could accept this.  
  
“All right, then,” she said. It was at the same time the hardest thing she’d ever said, and the easiest.  
  
That small, genuine smile appeared on his face again, larger this time, accompanied by something that might have been relief and might have been pride. And she could read the larger truth too, the truth of his friendship and his respect.  
  
She finished her tea and got up to put the cup in the sink, silently taking his when he handed it to her.  
  
“Ahsoka,” he said as she cleaned the cups. “Are you still not calling yourself a Jedi?”  
  
She finished with the cups and set them on the drainboard before turning back to him, feeling the counter dig into her back and the faint grittiness of the sand she hadn’t quite managed to wipe away fully. “I’m not.” And suddenly what had seemed impossible, insurmountable, only a short time ago felt as easy as the truth she’d spoken to him earlier. “But maybe someday I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> If you’re wondering about Anakin, don’t worry - he and Ahsoka will meet again. But this had to happen first.


End file.
